I’m a sophmore in high school and have a question about training for the 400m. We only have 2 coaches on our track team, so there is no coach that specially trains us. Our coach basically seems to be just guessing what we will do during practice. We been doing 400mx5 and 600x5. I dont disagree with the 400 meter, except I feel he layed on a lot of volume to fast. This is because this was the first time we trained using the 400 intervals. I think we should only do 4 400m and train for quality instead of quantity. I disagree with training with 600m though. My feeling is that we should do intervals with 200m, 300m, and 400m. Is my thinking right or not?
Also, I went to another high school last year, and they had better coaches, and more coaches at that. And at that school, they trained with 200m, 300m, and 400m, and I had good success training like that. So should I just follow what the coach is doing (my thinking is no) or should I try to persuade him in training us with 200m, 300m, and 400m intervals? He’s kind of closed minded, but I could try. Thanks for any responses.
Read around on the boards and get some info, develop a plan and present it to him with some evidence why it works and a good argument why it would work for you.
OR…
You can do like I do and not run for your school, but run USATF, train yourself and see better results
The track team is sort of mediocore. Alright athletes, but coaches is mediocore to me. It actually gets me sort of a frustrated feeling of watching the coach gives us the track work for the day. He basically just guesses off of the top of his head.
Im about to complain a little, but this is some problems I see at my schools track team. First, warmups arn’t taken seriously by coach or the people. Our warmup consists of one lap, then do basically the correct stretches most all track teams do, except we do each one only 10 seconds. I get around that by warming up before practice with 2 laps and stretch on my own doing each for 30 seconds. I just act like I stretch when we stretch with the team. Second, I see the coach just gives us stuff to do off the top of his head, and dosn’t even time us. I could go on and on, but I find ways to get around most of this on my own.
And about that USATF, how exactly can a high school athlete get into something like that? I was looking for some other alternative then running for my high school, but couldn’t find one. So, if you know, how could a high school athlete get into USATF?
Coman - Go to USATF.com and look under associations for your state’s association. That should give you all the info.
Gov - We have a couple fast people and that’s it. Our coaches aren’t that great so only the faster people get faster, but it’s more off maturity than anything.
I checked out the USATF webiste and found that there isn’t any track events going on in my location. Any other ideas as to what to do? I really want to avoid running under my high school next year, so any ideas? Anyone?
I find it unlikely that there are that few meets going on where you are. In my province alone I could easily get probably about 15 competitions a year, or more. If I was willing to make a few trips I could bump that up to 20. Did you check your state association?
I’ll look around for you but it seems to me that it should be something going on in Columbia or something like that. Also if it’s not too far from you, you might wanna check NC (Charlotte, Raleigh) for something.
